Montgomery County Marks 250 Years by Silencing the Press
Montgomery County will launch its 250th anniversary celebration next week with a panel on history, reflection, and progress. The kickoff stands in sharp contrast to Maryland’s long tradition of openness and dissent, instead telling a story of exclusion and the silencing of a voice the county doesn't like. The Montgonion and this journalist have again been denied access to the press pool.
Barring a news writer who employs satire from attending as a journalist is a unilateral and subjective decision, made by County Council President Kate Stewart, to certify who counts as “the press” and narrow the circle of voices able to question and document leaders. In a state whose history is rich with fearless satire and dissent, it is a particularly stark reality.
Three centuries ago, Ebenezer Cooke, in his mock-epic The Sot-Weed Factor, ridiculed the corruption and absurdities of colonial Maryland. His pen skewered planters, lawyers, and officials with a freedom that today’s Montgomery County leadership is unwilling to tolerate.
In Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe transformed irony and grotesque parody into art, unsettling the powerful by revealing the darkness beneath polite society. Later, H.L. Mencken, the “Sage of Baltimore,” became America’s sharpest social critic, mocking the arrogance of political elites and exposing hypocrisy wherever it lay. Mencken understood that satire is not an enemy of democracy, but its conscience—a way of forcing power to look in the mirror.
Exactly 250 years ago, the Continental Congress was in session, having just received Benjamin Franklin’s Plan of Confederation. Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanack and Silence Dogood letters shaped early American political satire, knew that a free press was essential to the survival of the new nation. “Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation,” Franklin warned, “must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.” Montgomery County, at its quarter-millennium mark, has forgotten that history lesson.
The Council’s refusal to recognize independent journalism, even at an event celebrating history itself, diminishes more than one media outlet. It diminishes the legitimacy, reputation and legacy of an elected official and career civil servant, as well as her council peers forced to stand uncomfortably silent. Worse, it diminishes the County’s claim to honor its own traditions. This is the place that produced Douglass, Mencken, and countless voices who insisted on speaking truth to power. To celebrate 250 years while silencing dissent is not commemoration. It is a shameful, ugly contradiction.
Maryland’s great satirists and truth-tellers understood that democracy is strengthened, not weakened, by letting uncomfortable voices into the room. Montgomery County and Kate Stewart would do well to remember that, before this anniversary becomes remembered less for celebration than for suppression.
